Contributing

We believe the OpenPower database project is a worthwhile endeavour that will help make
small improvements to the world by helping everyone play a role in monitoring their energy
consumption. Efforts like these have financial and labor costs, and relies heavily on
contributions from people like you.

Submit Data

The easiest way to contribute to the project is to contribute data. Pick a manufacturer and
help us catalog their Product Families and Product Models, and then identify manufacturer
specified environmental data (power consumption, heat production, etc). As the meat and potatoes
of the system, this is useful immediately once it is verified.

Optionally, you can provide user-measured data points using equipment at your location (such as
the inexpensive Kill-A-Watt to measure realtime power consumption) and then submit the metrics
for existing Product Models in the system. User-measured data is then aggregated and cleansed and
provided for products when there is no official manufacturer data published.

Submit data for a few products, or for hundreds of products. Your contributions will be valued
by the whole community.

Validate Data

While there is a website, API, and several other components of the project, the real prize is
the data. As data comes into the platform it needs to be scrubbed and validated. We need to ensure
that the data is maintained of the top most quality. A system with poor data is not useful to anyone.

Validating data is a great way to make a contribution if you feel that you don't have the
technical skills to program software but still want to participate. It is a chance to give back
and increase the confidence in the usability of the data while also minimizing the use of your
time.

Write Software

OpenPower is an open-source and open-data project. If you are a talented developer who wants
to make real impact on the world then contributing your time to improve the OpenPower platform
and API is a sure way to do that. Even if you have little experience, there are plenty of opportunities
to work on small pieces of code to fix bugs or make improvements.

Additionally, there is always a demand for design talent to improve the website designs and create
compelling marketing and correspondence designs so that we can expand our reach and connect with
as many people as possible.

Donate

Financial donations can make a significant impact on our ability to develop the platform and
API, as well as market the platform to grow awareness. It helps to pay for our hosting costs
and provide dedicated developer and data management time so we can ensure that we are providing
a high level of service with meaningful data.

If you are able to provide financial or service (hosting, database, etc) donations please
contact us at
kevin@welikeinc.com
to make arrangements. You will be recognized on the OpenPower website and in supplicant documentation
as a sponsor, and your contribution will help to make a real impact.

Share With The World

By far one of the easiest but also high impact things you can do for the OpenPower project is
to tell other people about it. Sharing an introduction about OpenPower and why it is useful on
your social network feeds will help spread the word and make the data accessible to everyone. For
every person who uses a product that uses OpenPower data there is a very high chance that they
will reduce their power consumption and then in turn tell others. This kind of social spread gives
us the opportunity to work together to make measurable impact on our Earth.

Did you share on Facebook or Twitter? Let us know by emailing at
kevin@welikeinc.com
with a link to your post so that we can thank you.